A syntactic and semantic treatment of Japanese floating quantifiers is provided from a perspective of unification based grammatical theories and model theoretic semantics. The inventory of floating quantifiers under consideration includes not only familiar cardinals but also other quantificational elements such as universals. Syntactically, floating quantifiers are taken to be adverbial endocentric modifiers for some V-projections. Scrambling phenomena involving multiple floating quantifiers will also be accounted for without employing movement rules of any sort. Floating quantifiers function as semantic (but not syntactic) determiners (seen in the Generalized Quantifier theory) which establish a proper relationship between two sets (corresponding to a common noun and a one-place predicate) one of which functions as a domain of quantification. In addition to presenting the specifics of the syntactic and semantic accounts for the phenomena in question, this thesis considers consequences of the proposed account and offers a new perspective on a universal theory of quantification. A typological classification of language is proposed which establishes the opposition between 'floating quantifier oriented' vs. 'determiner oriented' languages. From this perspective, a comparison between Japanese and English is carried out and some typological differences between the two are shown to follow from the envisaged opposition.

A syntactic and semantic treatment of Japanese floating quantifiers is provided from a perspective of unification based grammatical theories and model theoretic semantics. The inventory of floating quantifiers under consideration includes not only familiar cardinals but also other quantificational elements such as universals. Syntactically, floating quantifiers are taken to be adverbial endocentric modifiers for some V-projections. Scrambling phenomena involving multiple floating quantifiers will also be accounted for without employing movement rules of any sort. Floating quantifiers function as semantic (but not syntactic) determiners (seen in the Generalized Quantifier theory) which establish a proper relationship between two sets (corresponding to a common noun and a one-place predicate) one of which functions as a domain of quantification. In addition to presenting the specifics of the syntactic and semantic accounts for the phenomena in question, this thesis considers consequences of the proposed account and offers a new perspective on a universal theory of quantification. A typological classification of language is proposed which establishes the opposition between 'floating quantifier oriented' vs. 'determiner oriented' languages. From this perspective, a comparison between Japanese and English is carried out and some typological differences between the two are shown to follow from the envisaged opposition.

en_US

dc.type

text

en_US

dc.type

Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic)

en_US

dc.subject

Japanese language -- Quantifiers

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dc.subject

Grammar, Comparative and general -- Quantifiers.

en_US

thesis.degree.name

Ph.D.

en_US

thesis.degree.level

doctoral

en_US

thesis.degree.discipline

Linguistics

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thesis.degree.discipline

Graduate College

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thesis.degree.grantor

University of Arizona

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dc.contributor.advisor

Oehrle, Richard T.

en_US

dc.contributor.committeemember

Langendoen, Terence

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dc.contributor.committeemember

Barss, Andrew

en_US

dc.identifier.proquest

9123476

en_US

dc.identifier.oclc

701553334

en_US

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